Transgender Bathroom Battle: Causes and Cures

The North Carolina bathroom law requiring people to use public restrooms based on their gender at birth is part of the ongoing cultural clash between the secular left and the religious right.  Responding to the current North Carolina law, President Obama issued national guidelines requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms associated with their gender identity. 

The battle lines are drawn.  For President Obama and other transgender advocates, transgender bathroom choice is a civil rights issue comparable to the civil rights laws ending discrimination against racial minorities.  Conservative religious groups recoil from this topsy turvy new world of gender identity.  Gender is not a state of mind that can change on a whim.  It is a biological fact.  Bionically, men and women are created for companionship and to procreate and populate the world.  And from the fig leaf forward modesty between the sexes is a hallmark of the religious.  For them, separate bathrooms for the sexes makes obvious common sense and is in keeping with the natural order of the world.  

In reality, transgenderism is biologically based.  The biology of gender development involves chromosomes, hormones and brain structure.  Almost always, sex chromosomes and sex hormones work in concert so that our brain and our sexual characteristics match. For a small minority, significantly less than 1%, sex chromosomes and hormones interplay differently such that a male fetus develops with a female brain and a female fetus develops with a male brain.  Hence a transgender is born.

The use of gender language often confuses rather than clarifies the bathroom debate.  It can muddy the distinctions between biology, sexual preference, and sexual expression when talking about masculinity and femininity.  To the uninitiated, encountering gender language is a plunge down the rabbit hole.  You are not born male or female.  Instead you are assigned a gender at birth, as if your sexual designation is a choice comparable to how you are named.  Instead of the two sexes there are close to sixty genders and counting proclaimed by Facebook users.  They range from gender queer (someone who identifies with multiple genders), to gender fluid (someone who fluctuates between being male and female), to everything else in between.   These gender terms are completely subjective.  All it seems to take these days to establish an entirely new gender category is for someone to think one up.

Ironically, transgenderism suffers from being included in gender speak which implies that gender is a choice, sometimes a whimsical choice, rather than a biological imperative.  The intense and lifelong feeling of being trapped in the wrong body is a very real biological condition that often causes years of suffering.  Understandably there is pushback from the transgender community to the North Carolina law as they know that theirs is not a whimsical choice but a real condition.

It is tempting to consider disparate treatment of transgender citizens as a civil rights issue in the same way blacks were treated disparately by establishing separate bathrooms for whites and blacks.  But the transgender controversy is not about separate sets of bathrooms; rather it is about bathroom labelling.  The President’s effort to stretch civil rights discrimination around bathroom labelling leads to surprising consequences.

Discrimination occurs when decisions are based on a trait without a compelling or inherent justification.   For example, an employment decision not to hire based on gender identity absent another compelling basis is discriminatory.  The solution requires the employer to hire the individual.  Why then isn’t requiring bathroom choice based on gender identity a solution to gender discrimination?  Substitute the word race for gender identity in the last sentence – requiring bathroom choice based on race – and the gender identity solution now seems problematic.

Consider also the consequences of school bathroom choice based on gender identity.  Not only would boys who identify as girls rightfully use the girls’ restrooms but heterosexual boys would also have that right.  The only difference between these two anatomical boys is their gender identity and, according to transgender advocates, Title IX bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity which then logically encompasses heterosexual boys who self-identify as boys.  Ironically, the way to ensure that bathrooms do not discriminate against gender identity is to have two separate but equal bathrooms based on biological sex.

Still, male and female bathrooms remain problematic.  Transgender men and women often hesitate to enter bathrooms they identify with because of the very real threat of violence and or verbal abuse.  Without separate male and female bathrooms, traditionalists worry about their privacy being violated, and about the potential for sexual predators taking advantage of gender identity laws.  With documented cases of sexual deviants masquerading as transgender men entering bathrooms and locker rooms, this worry is not an excuse for discrimination but a concern based in fact.

Perhaps there is another way.  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides a template for addressing these bathroom dilemmas, particularly the ADA concepts of major life functions, legitimate conditions, and reasonable accommodations.  Although established for the workplace, the conceptual framework of the ADA could be applied to any environment to address the needs of those with special requirements, along with a blueprint for addressing these special needs.  Under ADA guidelines, going to the bathroom is a major life function that qualifies for a reasonable accommodation to those with a legitimate condition effecting bathroom use. These accommodations are then created through discussion between the stakeholders.  Reasonable accommodations take into account the health and safety of everyone and the feasibility of making such accommodations, including any undue hardships such as available resources and organizational size.

Using the ADA approach legitimizes special needs and provides a dignified method to broach a delicate subject.  This measured, systematic, collaborative approach holds out hope for avoiding the divisive and contentious environment evident in imposing a one size fits all solution based on a questionable civil rights violation. 

In Defense of Religion

Like most of the world, Secularism is rising in America, while religious participation is sharply declining.  As more and more scientific principles explain what was once attributed to a creator, belief in God logically erodes.  It’s all too easy to see religion as merely quaint biblical myths and stories, comforting and palliative to believers, but dangerous when religious ideas are brought into the public square.  Or so the argument goes.  But there is another view.

For centuries, Judaeo Christian principles organized Western Civilization.  The old and new testaments served as blueprints for establishing social values and civic responsibilities, allowing for peaceful coexistence within stable, just societies.  The wisdom found in the bible served society well for two thousand years.

Clearly the idea of ethical monotheism was a great leap forward in mankind’s thinking—it replaced the self-centered animistic view of multiple totem gods with a universal God that required people to think beyond themselves.  The ideas of universality and of a non-corporeal being reflected abstract thinking that became essential for scientific reasoning.  Indeed, modern scientists, like Einstein, used God as a metaphorical guide when contemplating the principles of the universe.

Science and religion cover non overlapping spheres of human existence.  Science covers the physical sphere, and religion covers the social sphere, giving us rules for social conduct and ethics.  But science and religion intersect when explaining the creation of the universe.  The scientific view is that the universe was created from the inflation of a single infinitesimally small point containing all of the elements of the universe.  For our universe to coalesce and form, gravity and other forces needed to be so precise that it could not happen by chance … which sounds like the work of a creator. 

Scientists address the implication of a non-physical explanation for the creation of the universe with the multiverse theory.  In this theory universes are constantly being formed, indeed an infinite number of formations.  With an infinite number of formations our universe could happen by chance.  Importantly, however, there is no proof for the multiverse theory.  Like the religious view it remains an article of faith.

As America secularizes, the consequences to society are not favorable but predictable.  The concepts of sacred and profane are lost in a secular society as these concepts are embedded in religious beliefs.  Simply put, sacred thoughts and actions bring people closer to God; profane behavior does exactly the opposite.   

Without the restraint of the sacred, people can gravitate towards the profane of self-indulgence and self-gratification.   The trend towards the profane is evident – a coarsening of dialogue, immodesty, drug addiction and crime, alienation, and a breakdown of the nuclear family.  The profane has even entered the campaign for the highest office in the land in the form of Donald Trump. 

But what about the evil committed in the name of Christianity -- the medieval murders by Crusaders and the torture during the Inquisition?  This happened a long time ago, prior to the Protestant Reformation in 1517.  Obviously, Judaeo Christian leaders no longer advocate murder or torture.  True, some religious practitioners do not live up to religious teachings and act immorally or engage in cover-ups of evil deeds to protect religious institutions.   Yet there is an absolute standard to judge actions, and when evil is spotlighted and forced out of the shadows no religious figure is immune from religious condemnation.

For the non-religious, an absolute standard is replaced by an individual standard derived from reason and feeling.  The consequences of actions taken by countries and people un-moored from Judaeo Christian morality are devastating.   Many modern godless societies murdered and tortured millions upon millions of people – The Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and North Korea to name some.  In this country, atheists used reason to advocate for eugenics and forced sterilization of undesirables.

Yet religion remains a question mark for many because of religiously conservative stances on a number of contentious social issues.  In my next blog I will explore some of these hot button issues.